Industry experts offer predictions on how Cloud will evolve and impact business in 2026. Part 3 covers Multi, Hybrid and Private Cloud.

MULTI-CLOUD

Multi-Cloud Will Become the Default Operating Model: A big part due to recent disruptions, multi-cloud is going to become the default operating model in 2026. As we see an acceleration in multi-cloud strategies, we will move beyond vendor-specific Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) and more toward tools like Terraform to build and deploy across multiple clouds.
John Waller
Cloud & Security Practice Lead, UltraViolet Cyber

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Will Become a Strategic Architecture, Not a Choice: Most enterprise clients are already using more than one hyperscaler, driven by a deliberate strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and negotiate discounted rates on bulk service mapping. In 2026, multi-cloud and hybrid environments will become architectural necessities. Organizations will strategically place critical components in the public cloud for scalability and high availability, use private cloud for data security and cheaper hardware for AI initiatives, and rely on specialized clouds for AI and compliance workloads. This diversification will define cloud strategy through the next year.
Rohan Gupta
VP, Cloud, Security & DevOps, R Systems

OPEN-SOURCE MULTI-CLOUD

2026 cloud strategy will be defined by freedom, not footprint. Enterprises are realizing that single-provider dependency has become the biggest threat to agility and negotiating power. The next wave of growth will come from open source–driven, multi-cloud architectures that preserve flexibility while still harnessing hyperscaler scale.
Anil Inamdar
Global Head of Data, NetApp Instaclustr

MULTI-CLOUD DRIVES AIOPS

Multi-cloud strategies will strengthen demand for third-party AIOps platforms, as enterprises avoid hyperscaler vendor lock-in and seek end-to-end integration across hybrid environments.
Ritu Dubey
Market Head, Digitate

HYBRID ECOSYSTEMS

In 2026, we'll watch the big three cloud providers lose their monopoly on enterprise compute. Companies will architect hybrid ecosystems that stretch across hyperscalers, private infrastructure, and the edge — driven not by cost-cutting, but by control. The days of one-cloud dependency are ending; agility will come from being everywhere at once.
Dr. Hema Raghavan
Head of Engineering and Co-Founder, Kumo

THE GREAT UNCLOUDING

The great "unclouding": After years of expanding multi-cloud architectures, organizations will start simplifying. We'll see a push to consolidate workloads into fewer, better-managed platforms to regain cost control and performance.
Ha Hoang
CIO, Commvault

PRIVATE CLOUD

Private clouds will grow in the next year or so: From my conversations with IT leaders, I'm inclined to believe private cloud will grow in the next year or so. That said, the definition of "private cloud" is not clear and varies by audience. For some private cloud means a well-defined set of capabilities wholly hosted on a hyperscaler's infrastructure. For others it means "cloud like" capabilities hosted in a private or colo hosted data center. And yet, for others, it means a hybrid approach across multiple public and private locations including the neoclouds. Whatever the definition is — the point is that most companies mean it to be a largely bespoke implementation that meets their organizations' needs. That will, for sure, continue if not grow.
Juan Orlandini
Chief Technology Officer, North America, Insight Enterprises

As we look ahead to 2026, we'll see even more investment in data centers as hyperscalers continue to lead the way. AI is driving massive demand for processing power and energy, and the cost of cloud isn't going down anytime soon. As that continues to grow, we'll also see cooling and power costs rise right alongside it. At the same time, customers will take a more balanced approach, keeping their most critical, revenue-driven workloads in private cloud environments and use hyperscalers for projects that are less central to the business. 
Ryan Huffine
VP of Services, SHI

As macroeconomic trends drive a focus on cost cutting, this could mark the beginning of a cloud repatriation, as CIOs and CFOs finally calculate the true cost of achieving enterprise-grade availability on public cloud, where anything beyond basic SLAs requires redundant regions and architectures that can cost many multiples of initial estimates. After watching hyperscaler outages take down critical infrastructure repeatedly, enterprises will realize that modern private cloud solutions now deliver superior uptime at predictable costs, with many offering 99.99%+ SLAs as standard versus the 99.95% you get from hyperscalers. The migrations back to private cloud will accelerate as companies discover they can achieve better availability, predictable monthly costs, and actual accountability from their providers, without playing Russian roulette every time a hyperscaler has a bad day.
Nick Zeigler
VP, Digital Innovation, All Covered

CLOUD REPATRIATION

After years of aggressive cloud migration, companies have increasingly realized that public cloud isn't the best fit for every workload. While public cloud still is the right choice for some, rising costs and performance frustrations are driving leaders to evaluate which applications are truly fit for the cloud. In 2026, cloud repatriation will become a strategic focus for organizations rethinking their cloud approach. Automated, static workloads are likely to move back on-premises or into private clouds to cut increasing costs. IT leaders who ask the right questions and prioritize a "think first" over "act first" mindset will make the most of repatriation.
Jesse Stockall
Chief Architect, Flexera

The cloud is going to see serious competition from cloud exits to the data center, both because of cost control and data sovereignty. People are realizing that the flexibility of the cloud is now available on-premises, and the risk of not controlling your own destiny (both in terms of cost and outages) is non-trivial.
Steve Francis
CEO, Sidero Labs

PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Platform Engineering Will Become the Backbone of Multi-Cloud and DevOps Success: As cloud and DevOps mature into central components of business operations, the industry will see a surge in demand for multi-cloud engineers, platform engineers, AIOps and intelligent automation engineers, DevSecOps and cloud security engineers, site reliability engineers, and FinOps analysts. Soon, organizations will be operating across multi-cloud, hybrid, and edge-native environments that are too complex for manual or siloed DevOps teams. The most impactful investment will be hybrid-cloud capability building supported by platform engineering, which will hide infrastructure complexity while enforcing security, compliance, and cost controls automatically.
Rohan Gupta
VP, Cloud, Security & DevOps, R Systems

Check back next week for DataOps predictions